Pawang

Malay Medicine
The pawang or the magician is the functionary of the great and traditional importance in a Malay village, though in places near town the office is felling into abeyance. The pawang is the accredited intermediary between men and spirits.

In the inland districts, however the pawang is still a power, and regarded as part of the constituted order of the society, without whom no village community would be complete. It must understood that he has nothing whatever to do with the official religious of Islam.

The pawang is quite outside this system, and belongs to a different and much older order of ideas; he may be regarded as the legitimate representative of primitive medicine-man or village-sorcerer, and his very existence in this days is an anomaly, though it does not strike Malays as such.
Malay Medicine